


After Life

by orphan_account



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, a hint of hurt/comfort, angst with hopeful ending, cuddles at the end, whump (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21582388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “What did you expect, a hug? You brought me back. To be athing.” He drawled the last word like it was acid on his tongue. “Touseme against someone. And not just anyone, Sara. My partner.”
Relationships: Mick Rory/Leonard Snart, Sara Lance/Leonard Snart, Sara Lance/Mick Rory, Sara Lance/Mick Rory/Leonard Snart
Comments: 12
Kudos: 45





	After Life

**Author's Note:**

> For Dwyn, whose prompt I did not follow because I can only write angst, but I hope you enjoy anyway!

After—

After the kiss—

After the Oculus—

After his fire flared bright blue and went out, and a flame in Sara flickered and died with him—

After she watched Mick figure it out, too late, as if thirty damn years wasn’t enough for him—

After all their secrets came out in one awful night, when Mick marched onto the almost-empty bridge and demanded to know what Sara had been to his partner, and fuck it, he’d had decades to work out how he felt about Len and all she’d had was a few months and a kiss cut short—

After the tide of recriminations ebbed, and they touched the spark of something new, surprising, a bond that was all they had left—

After the totem brought _him_ back, the bloodiest of Sara’s ghosts— after Death Witch summoned his spirit from the Oculus, from the nowhere it had gone—

After they dragged him, naked and shivering, off the cold floor of the bridge—

After he screamed under the bright lights of the med lab, recoiled from Mick’s touch like it burned, and wouldn’t so much as open his eyes to look at Sara—

After they turned off the lights and left him groaning alone in the darkness—

—they sat on the floor of Mick’s room, side by side, backs to the wall, and drank, and drank, and drank.

“What the fuck,” he said, when he’d grabbed the bottle of Jack off her and downed half of it, “are we gonna do now?”

Sara just shook her head up at the viewscreen, in a high corner of the room, that passed for a window.

It was snowing out there.

* * *

Then—

Then nothing, for a long time.

Sara caught glimpses, sometimes. A ghost fading around a corner, slipping back into the carcass of the ship. A thief in the night.

He was recovering… according to Gideon. He wouldn’t see either of them, and they couldn’t get nearly close enough to ask why.

He didn’t even leave the ship. He just haunted it.

Word was, he’d taken a liking to some of the newcomers. After a few weeks, when he’d finally begun to sneak out of his room, in what passed for night on this timeless boat, he could sometimes be found exchanging snark in the kitchen with Zari. Drinking with Constantine. Keeping a late bridge vigil with Nora, swapping ever taller tales. A magical fable here, a heist story there.

_Your life sounds like a bad movie. _

_You’re one to talk._

That’s what Gideon told Sara, when she made her. There were override codes involved. It got bloody.

Lying in bed, with Mick warm against her, she whispered, “I just want to know if he’s okay. If he’s… alive.”

He hummed, wordless as ever, and his arms tightened around—

* * *

And then—

If she were a better person, Sara would have given him space forever, if he’d needed it.

She wasn’t a better person.

She came back to herself in the kitchen, holding a knife to his throat.

His snark pulled her out of it, bitter and familiar like the whiskey she’d been getting drunk on every night, ever since he’d been back. “Proud of yourself, are you?”

The knife clattered to the floor. “I’m sorry.” One, two steps backward. “You— you startled me.”

A laugh under his breath. “I startled _you_. The ghost startled the assassin. But then I guess _ghost_ is practically a qualification for existing on this ship, isn’t it—“

“Stop it.” Her hands were in her hair.

She could have defended herself. Could have told him she’d been having these… episodes… ever since Death Witch.

She didn’t defend herself.

She turned to leave. His voice, smooth like poison, pulled her up short. “Cut and run, like always, Sara?”

“You wouldn’t talk to us,” she murmured to the door.

He didn’t ask who _us_ was. “What did you expect, a hug? You brought me back. To be a _thing_.” He drawled the last word like it was acid on his tongue. “To _use_ me against someone. And not just anyone. My partner, Sara.”

God, the way he said her name, foreign to her ears. The way he looked at her, like she was a stranger.

Rage was warping his face. That face that she’d missed so much. “My partner of thirty years. You have no idea what the two of us have shared—”

“I have some idea.” It slipped out before she could cork the words back into the bottle. Into the box deep inside her, where she kept everything locked away, until Death tore it open and unleashed her darkness on the world.

“What does that mean?” he hissed.

“I thought you’d have heard by now.” A blankness was settling over her, like snow on the soft earth. And maybe there was still some of that wicked Witch left in her poisoned heart. Or maybe the flame that went out when he died had never rekindled, and she was still frozen inside. “Mick and I. We’ve been a thing since you’ve been gone.”

His face twisted a little more.

And she wasn’t going to _cry_, dammit, not even if one of the only people in the world who could make her cry was standing in front of her, in the flesh, and he couldn’t fucking look at her.

But maybe she should have. At least, crying, she knew she wasn’t dead.

Whirling around, she walked away before either of them could make it any—

* * *

Then—

“Have you heard?” Mick was in her doorway, panting, his face ruddy. “He’s going back to Central.”

She was on her feet, and she couldn’t do anything but gape at him. “He can’t.”

“Z says Gideon’s cleared him.” He shrugged. “Good as new. Guess he’d rather be running jobs back in our old haunts than here, where he could run into—”

“He can’t.” She leaned into him. His arms came up around her. “What do we do?”

He didn’t complain that she was ruining the leather of his jacket.

* * *

Now.

She stands in the shadowed door of the docked jump ship, with Mick still and silent behind her.

Len was never the ghost here.

“Don’t go.”

He flinches when she steps aboard the ship. Barely, but she sees it, the hitch of his breath, and he really is breathing—

He’s finally looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she’s closer now, close enough to take his hand, but he’s the one who has to be brave. “I never meant to hurt you.”

She doesn’t say it out loud. Not Death Witch or bringing him back or _Mick_. That all they had was each other and their ghosts.

There’s a broad, warm body wrapping around her from behind, reaching out a battle-scarred hand. Len doesn’t move. He’s staring at Sara’s fragile hands, tiny next to Mick’s. Those tiny, fragile hands that pulled him out of the void and ripped his heart out of his dead chest.

“Just stay,” Mick says, softer than Sara’s ever heard him.

Firelight sparking in her darkness. A warmth against his cold.

And she doesn’t know if this is even possible. If Mick’s _never_ and her _almost_ could ever be a _something_.

_Just this once,_ she begs a universe that never gave her a break - just broke her, over and over. It took and took, and it can give her one damn thing back. Just this once.

Len lifts his eyes to meet his partner’s and Sara can’t look away. She’s never seen so much love there.

Until he turns his gaze on her.

It breaks. He scowls, petulant like a child. “You’re already doing this without me,” he says, and she’s never been so glad to hear his old drawl.

“Wanna do it _with_ you,” Mick croaks.

She hears herself agree. “Doesn’t that sound better?”

There’s the surprise of a smirk on his lips, when Len reaches out for them both.

* * *

Later—

“What do you want to do?” she asks.

She’s wrapped around him, and Mick’s wrapped around them both. It feels like a wake. And unless time literally breaks in the next hour, the rest of the ship can go fuck itself. Just for a little while.

Len doesn’t answer.

Sara tilts her head to look at him. His eyes are haunted.

“Lenny.” Mick’s big hands are in Len’s rough hair. “This got long without me. You want me to cut it for you?”

Len blinks, jerking around to look at him. The smile they share is a locked safe, crammed with thirty years of memories, and Sara doesn’t have the key.

Then there’s the tremor of an arm on hers. “You do it.”

She hesitates.

His hand curls into hers. “Mick’ll show you.”

She runs a razor across his head with a hand that doesn’t shake and he breathes and breathes and lets her bring him back to life. If she has to pause to drag her sleeve across her face a few times, she’s grateful that neither of them says a word.

Curled around each other, they fall asleep to Gideon’s simulated rain on the ceiling. And it’s not real, but it reminds them that they’re here.

That they’re somehow— all of them— alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments very welcome - I always reply!
> 
> Come find me on [tumblr](https://sophiainspace.tumblr.com/), [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/sophiacatherin5) or [dreamwidth](https://sophia-catherine.dreamwidth.org/).


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